Electronic Book Review - dicksteinhttp://electronicbookreview.com/tags/dickstein
enSelling Out in a Buyer's Markethttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/leftacademic
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Michael Bérubé</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">1996-04-15</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/criticalecologies/outselling">Cultural Criticism and The Politics of Selling Out</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>First of all, I’m grateful for so engaging and voluminous a response to <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/outselling">Selling Out</a>, and grateful to Joe Tabbi for orchestrating the whole exchange. Since he’s also allowed me a response to my respondents, my debts to him are really piling up. I can’t (and almost certainly shouldn’t) reply to every point raised by every writer in <span class="journaltitle">ebr2</span>, but I do think it’s worth dealing with the essays more or less to the degree that they challenge or improve on mine.</p>
<p>Under that heading I’ll have to devote my most sustained response to Cary Wolfe, who, in the course of graciously agreeing with me about almost everything, manages to unravel the most important threads of my essay - the ones that hold my argument in place. So I’m going to have to patch things up here and there before I get to more specific points of disagreement. Basically, Wolfe’s identified the most serious tension in the stuff I’ve been doing over the past few years - that is, the tension between the theoretical positions I’m most comfortable with (generally-sympathetic-to-but-critical-of-poststructuralism) and the “left liberal humanism” I endorse in the realm of practical policy making. Wolfe’s argument on the passing of representationalism is particularly bracing, and the extent to which I agree with it is also the extent to which I find inadequate Todd Gitlin’s and John Patrick Diggins’ calls for a return to the Enlightenment rhetoric of universal rights. I wish “Selling Out” registered more materially my agreement with Wolfe on these counts, because I think that our agreement on such matters sheds some necessary light on the relation between the work of theory and the exigencies of public policy. For instance, I think Wolfe is entirely right to suggest that my essay tends to stress the latter at the expense of the former. The question remains, however: how might our theoretical differences signify when translated into ideas about the social efficacy of intellectual work?</p>
<p>I’ll answer that question by opening with the most fundamental of our theoretical disagreements. To wit: I think Wolfe is quite wrong to throw out the idea of normative accounts along with Habermas’ conception of the public sphere, and, furthermore, I think this kind of slippage is characteristic of one of the signal failings of the academic left. On the one hand, Wolfe is probably right to reject Habermas’ idea of an undifferentiated public sphere (and here again I wish my essay had been more rigorous in this respect), but on the other hand, probably wrong to think that claims about justice and freedom can be advanced without reference to normative accounts of justice and freedom. In other words, I agree with my friend and colleague Amanda Anderson (see “Cryptonormativism and Double Gestures: Reconceiving Poststructuralist Social Theory”), and with her reading of Habermas, in that I do believe there’s a “cryptonormative” dimension to poststructuralism, as indeed there is a cryptonormative dimension to any form of social critique. “Critique,” in my vocabulary, does suggest that some social dispensations are better than others, and that they are better for some reasons, with reference to some political standards. It’s in that sense that critique always has a “normative” dimension for me. But “normative” is not the same thing as “universalist,” nor is it the same thing as “normalizing.” In practical terms, that means that we (Wolfe, myself, and everyone of a sympathetic bent) should understand and try to negotiate with that fraction of “the public” we address when we speak to university administrations, K-12 schools, students, and readers of <span class="journaltitle">Harper’s</span>: we should understand the generic and political conventions we engage by moving into discursive arenas other than that of <span class="journaltitle">boundary2</span>, and (to derive an illegitimate ought from a merely implied is) we should move into those other discursive arenas with every chance we get. (I throw in this last clause,”with every chance we get,” as a concession to Stanley Fish’s latest salvo against the idea of the public intellectual, in <span class="booktitle">Professional Correctness</span>, because I agree with Fish - hence my critique of Jacoby, Dickstein et al. - that our “extra-academic” engagements are not simply a matter of voluntarism. I know perfectly well how difficult it is to crack the pages of mass-circulation magazines, never mind CNN).</p>
<p>Now that I’ve sketched out my major disagreement with <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/leftsystemic">Getting the Dirt</a>, the question remains, embedded somewhere in the preceding paragraph: what does this disagreement have to do with Wolfe’s ideas, and mine, about the social efficacy of intellectual work? For one thing, it means that “selling out” is not a single-standard, one-size-fits-all imperative: it involves different kinds of negotiations, contestations, and (sometimes) concessions in various intellectual/pedagogical settings. And that means that while Wolfe and I may agree about policy initiatives that concern homelessness and universal health care, we disagree about how we’re structurally related to those “public” spheres in which those initiatives are debated, as well as about how those structural relations condition the terms of our engagement with various publics (should we get to engage them at all). And if we take Wolfe’s critique of Habermas and Nancy Fraser into account, then he and I also disagree about the status of the truth-claims embedded in social critiques even while we may want to make the same claims: as for me, when I am asked to explain why x is better than y for purpose z, I plan to have in my pocket a local normative account of purpose z (its history, its insights and blindnesses, and the various rationales and justifications germane to its pursuit), regardless of whether that normative account can be referred to a universal theory of justice.</p>
<p>I came up against precisely this problem in concluding my book (<span class="booktitle">Life as We Know It</span> about my son James, disability law, prenatal testing, inclusive education, Down syndrome, and the idea of justice: I want to argue that welfare-state social policies are indeed more just, with regard to citizens like James, than laissez-faire capitalism, and I want to argue this from the standpoint of Habermas and John Rawls without subscribing to Habermas’ Enlightenment moral universalism or to Rawls’ formalist conception of an “original position” in which social agents deliberate justice behind a “veil of ignorance” according to which they do not even know their own interests. In fact, I have to start from a position other than Rawls’ precisely because James does: there’s no chance he can come to the bar of justice without bearing the traces of his idiosyncracies (from idios, meaning - of all things - “private”). I do not know whether <span class="booktitle">Life as We Know It</span> makes a sufficient case for a nonfoundationalist scheme of justice in which societies can sustain realms of “private” moral decision (as in the case of prenatal testing and inclusive education). But the point remains that neither Wolfe nor I can be comfortable with jumping horses in mid-gallop; neither of us is willing to say, we know these representational claims about human rights and democratic procedures are intellectually corrupt but politically effective so we’ll endorse them for now. How then to argue that it might be otherwise than it is right now, with regard to social policy, without (a) giving up on the idea of normativity or (b) acceding to the universalist terms in which most people think of the normative?</p>
<p>Compared to that impasse, our disagreements over the practical value of nationalism are pretty minor. Wolfe asks me to look at the left’s response to Michael Lind, but that response proves my point more than his: the left regards nationalism with schizophrenia, and can only answer Lind’s call for checks on the mobility of global capital by dreaming of internationalist labor unions. My point was somewhat more mundane than this, and though it isn’t in the body of the essay it formed the base of my original response to Joe Tabbi, who (being a savvy character) challenged me on my appeal to nationalism the minute it was uttered, back in Kansas in March of 1995. The point was this: in 1988, in one of those brief flashes of Truth that cut across national politics like undiscovered comets and then disappear, Jesse Jackson argued that our trade deficit was an epiphenomenon of corporate multinationalism: if we built in the U.S. all the things that U.S. corporations were contracting out to Singapore, Jackson noted, we wouldn’t be importing so many goods from Singapore. Indeed, if U.S. companies manufactured their products within U.S. borders, there wouldn’t be a trade deficit at all. Who benefits from the current arrangement? Consumers pay the import duties while corporations (and their investors) reap the rewards of Asian (or Mexican, or Caribbean) labor costs. We already have 80/20 laws on the books regulating interstate trade: a company incorporated in Delaware (and taking advantage of Delaware’s 2 percent corporate tax) must do at least 20 percent of its business in Delaware (which is why major bank loans tend to be financed by a variety of bank holding companies only 20 percent of which are based, legally, in Delaware). Why not, I suggest, propose similar constraints on the international movement of capital, instead of trying to create three major “free trade” zones via the EEC, the Pacific Rim, and the Uruguay Round? Why not seek to stabilize local production and international wages the way the EEC negotiated the competing claims of capitalism and nationalism, by setting an international floor for wages and national constraints on the movement of manufacturing bases? My sole point, with regard to the discourse of nationalism, is that there’s only one political force at present strong enough to contest the reign of global capital, and that’s the force of the “nation.” I think it’s a mistake, then, to see nationalism simply as a matter of suturing, interpellation, dyadic bonding in the imaginary, and so forth. It’s also a mistake to cede the discourse of economic nationalism to Pat Buchanan. Can’t we imagine, in theory and in practice, a discourse that draws on the affective appeal of nationalism (as Buchanan does artfully to fascist ends) but that reconceives that appeal as a pragmatic necessity rather than as a matter of blood and soil? To do this, I think, would first involve separating the cultural sense of nationalism from the social and political sense - as Lind fails to do, as Stuart Hall has increasingly sought to do, as Arthur Schlesinger apparently cannot do.(The most effective theoretical separation of the two can be found in Liah Greenfield’s <span class="booktitle">Nationalism</span>, in which she defines the nationalism of which I speak as “civic nationalism” as opposed to “ethnic nationalism”). And thus I come around finally to (almost) full agreement with Wolfe that in such matters, we who have lingered long at theory’s salad bar have a positive obligation to keep our pundits and politicians honest - and, if possible, intelligent and intelligible - to the best of our ability.</p>
<p>My response to Wolfe basically encapsulates my response to everybody else, with due apologies to everybody else. I found Robert Markley’s <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/strategic">essay</a> to be at once delightful and psychic: upon pulling it off the ‘Net I emailed him and insisted that he had read my mind about the political potential in the unprecedented concentration of wealth in the hands of black entertainers and athletes. <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span> readers are hereby invited to email me and ask me about my pet theory on this subject, namely, my conviction that Christian evangelists seek out black athletes so assiduously not merely because their tithes are really something but also because they realize how devastating the results of black economic nationalism could be when it’s driven by Michael Jordan, and they want to nip that blossom in the bud. To date, it’s not clear what we might expect from this new distribution of wealth: some athletes dream simply of buying their own team, while some dream of running for governor of Alabama as a Republican. Only Spike Lee, to date, has pressed the question, and even he doesn’t seem to be getting dramatic results; Kellen Winslow’s efforts, as Markley notes, haven’t yet gotten a column inch of news space.</p>
<p>So perhaps it would be best for us intellectual types to heed Markley’s advice to us: pool your resources. Nothing could be further from the academic habitus than the pooling of resources, which is one reason it’s so frustrating to see so many smart, literate, voluble leftist humanities professors consigned to political irrelevance (that’s also one reason why I give these damn pep talks nearly every chance I get). My advice on this front is pretty simple: get tenure and dig your heels in. Then say to hell with the academic habitus, and try, regardless of what your administration or your referees think of the attempt, to change the world without making it worse. Once you have the kind of job security tenure affords - a job security now enjoyed by less than sixty percent of the professoriate and by almost no one, save Bill Gates and Clarence Thomas, outside academe - you don’t have to jump through the rest of the hoops academe offers you. You can devote the rest of your (“private”) time to the revival of grass-roots progressivism - by joining the New Party, working for proportional representation, joining <span class="journaltitle">The Nation Associates</span>, buying a radio station (with pooled resources), running for local office, you name it. That’s what terrifies the Right on slow news days when Billy Kristol worries about tenured radicals: they fear that thousands of us, with our decent prose styles, solid typing skills, and compelling pedagogical practices, will actually get our act together and behave like the intelligentsia behaves in other industrialized nations - like a thorn in the side of the forces of privatization. The problem is, of course, that when the Right isn’t worrying about us, they’re laughing at us, because the only things we’ve been able to do so far are to prevent the MLA from holding its convention in most of the fifty states and to circulate a bunch of letters from named chairs in Yale’s English department, all of whom scorn the idea of negotiating with mangy union workers.</p>
<p>The point is merely that we need to take our campus politics off campus -and oddly enough, I find myself in agreement with <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/elitism">Marjorie Perloff</a> on this score. Perloff tells me that there’s something happening but I don’t know what it is, so as John Lennon says, I feel so suicidal, just like Dylan’s Mister Jones. Actually, I find Professor Perloff’s paper perplexing. I’m perplexed whenever my elders chastise me by citing that old Mr. Zimmerman, but this is a special case. Perloff is apparently telling us that Shakespeare, he’s in the alley, and that all us academic lefties need a weatherman to tell us which way the wind blows. Well, all right. Frankly, I’m thrilled to hear that the arts are thriving outside the precincts of the university; here in the heart of the prairie, I can only read about such things in the papers. I mean this quite seriously: in the wake of the elections of 1994 it is simply a revelation to hear that the arts are not the elite, exclusive enterprise the Right has made them out to be. So I hope that Professor Perloff will do her civic duty, therefore, and inform the Republican Party of her findings, since they seem to be even more ignorant of the public appeal of the arts than I am. Marjorie Perloff is, after all, one of our most distinguished and astute critics of contemporary literature as well as a leading theorist of the history of the avant-garde, and her testimony to Congress would have a gravitas that mine would obviously lack. In the meantime, I feel compelled to remind Perloff that something’s happening and her essay doesn’t know what it is: as writer and social critic James Brown has put it, “stock market goin’ up, jobs / Goin’ down. / It ain’t no funky job to be found.” And since Mr. Brown wrote that line in 1974, it would seem that in this respect, the times they are a-stayin’ pretty much the same. Which is why the field is wide open for a political force willing to ask why wages have fallen since James Brown sang “Funky President” while corporate earnings and executive pay have soared to unprecedented heights. Perhaps a cash-strapped local rep company could stage a dramatization of Marvin Gaye’s epochal question of 1971: what’s going on?</p>
<p>As for Joe Amato’s <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/list-fully">response</a>: Joe’s designation of me as a “superstar” is, unfortunately for me, not a performative utterance. I am no more superstarry than I was when I arrived in Kansas in March of 1995 for my first-ever keynote address. How do I know this? I’ll explain that in a moment. The important thing, though, is that Amato’s characterization of me absolves him of having to deal with anything I have to say: I may agree with Bérubé, but he speaks from a position of superstar “privilege,” so I don’t have to deal with his actual arguments. This response is important less as a measure of Amato’s feelings about me than as a new and increasingly common pathology among left academics. According to this logic, there’s a class of people you don’t have to engage with at all except to note that they work in more fortunate circumstances than you do. Joe’s complaint, then, is simply that I write too much, and worse, that I strike “an occasional critical pose” as “a spokesperson for the many who are oppressed.” And yet his critique is not that I should be no such spokesperson, for he credits me with knowing that such a stance “is a problem.” Instead, he asks simply that I shut up every once in while: “a better policy, not to say strategy, might simply be not to speak or write, to excise that occasional gloss that gives offense…or exhibit some unease regarding same…because otherwise one risks coming off, as, well, glib - to those who hurt…”</p>
<p>All right, let me theorize my positionality, as we say in the industry, with respect to this critique. By any human standards, my family and I are absurdly privileged: we are free from torture, hunger, and most diseases preventable in industrialized nations. And I myself have been so extremely fortunate, amid a depressed academic economy, as to lay claim to Lou Gehrig’s claim to be the luckiest man alive. But that doesn’t mean I’ve earned full-dress resentment yet. First of all, I have noticed that even when I heed Amato’s advice I get no credit for it: I have not written a thing for four months now, being too busy with teaching, reviewing sixty-plus essays and five books under various professional obligations, and managing the diurnal rhythms of basic childcare, to write anything longer than blurbs and memos since January. It’s funny how that works. Over the past two days Janet and I have worked pretty hard to get Jamie to use the bathroom, and by gum, we don’t feel like academic stars when we’re doing prolonged potty-training with a “disabled” child. And yet it’s not very likely that anyone will notice this work professionally, and write, “during James’ toilet-training period, the work of Bérubé and Lyon took on a newly excremental, post-Deleuzian emphasis” or “during this period of silence, when Bérubé and Lyon wrote nothing, they did a mess of laundry and registered the kids for soccer.” So let’s remember, shall we, that when we throw around the “academic star” designation, we render invisible a domestic economy that has nothing to do with conference invites and feature articles in the <span class="journaltitle">Chronicle of Higher Education</span>.</p>
<p>And then let’s get a few things straight about the professional economy, too. Greg Ulmer speaks, in his <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/reinventive">reinview</a> with Joe Tabbi, of the experience of being reviewed as the experience of being misunderstood; can I remark, with three books to my name, on the experience of being not-reviewed as the experience of being not-understood? When my second book, <span class="booktitle">Public Access</span>, came out in the summer of 1994, I had recently been promoted to associate professor, at the superstar salary of $37,600. Two years ago, I thought that Public Access would be something of a “breakthrough” book, and I thought that Verso would market it aggressively - especially since, within four months of the publication date, I had placed essays in <span class="journaltitle">Harper’s</span> and the <span class="journaltitle">New Yorker</span>. I was wrong. And that’s how you know you’re just not a star: it’s not merely that you wake up and realize you’re still driving your own car, or that no one’s heeded your demand that the backstage refreshments be purged of orange M &amp; M’s. It’s when you realize that your book, hopefully (and, in retrospect, foolishly) titled <span class="booktitle">Public Access</span>, has gotten precisely two reviews in twenty months, and that since publication, your book has never been advertised in print media outside the <span class="journaltitle">minnesota review</span>. It’s when you realize that Andrew Ross, the post-postmodern icon of academic stardom, gets a cardboard cutout of his cute self at the Routledge book stall at the 1989 MLA; but even though you get mentioned in the same breath as Ross (as in the <span class="journaltitle">Chronicle</span>, or in Amato’s reply), Routledge declines even to bring your book to the 1994 MLA.</p>
<p>The point is that stars are, by definition, produced by the apparatus of commodity fetishism. However, when your publisher hides your book and no one reviews it, your book is not a fetishized commodity. You see no cutouts of yourself (which is good), no reviews of your work (which is bad); you even wonder what it’s like to be misunderstood by a reviewer. And at the same time, you know that compared to your child’s health, professional recognition in reviews and MLA conventions amounts to jackshit.</p>
<p>Yet - and this is the interesting thing about Amato’s response - we may have generated an academic apparatus in which names themselves are commodities even when they have no substantial connection to the intellectual work that goes under the name. Indeed, if Joe’s right, my name is now an academic commodity even though I never went through that pre-commodity stage in which people review your books in academic journals. If that’s the case, and I think it is, then I have all the more reason to regret the fact that my former colleague Joe Amato never did get around to addressing the actual content of my essay on the politics of selling out.</p>
<p>Which is to say, yet again, that the problem with the academic left isn’t that it’s “politicized”; the problem is that it’s so politically lame. Writing magazine articles, as I’ve admitted, is only one relatively indirect way of trying to change that; though the op-ed visibility of the 500-member, right-wing Independent Women’s Forum should remind us that print media still matter to policy makers and opinion-shapers, Greg Ulmer is entirely right to suggest that “the interactive matrix of technology, institutional practices, and identity formation” is changing radically in our time (hence the medium of this very exchange). Remember also that most of the people with “public access” to the Internet have median household incomes of $40,000 and up, which not only places them among the top half of wage-earners in the United States but also marks them as people most likely to vote. There is every reason, therefore, for the academic left to regard the Internet as a crucial “virtual public sphere,” and every reason for us to get versed in the theory and practice of using it. I say this partly because I just received, only today, April 20, 1996, my latest mailing from <span class="journaltitle">The Nation Associates</span> - a document that practically apologizes for the fact that <span class="journaltitle">The Nation</span> now has a home page, as if this development were a betrayal of <span class="lightEmphasis">Nation</span> writers like Kirkpatrick Sale and Neil Postman. Mercy, mercy me, I think, if the readers of the last remaining progressive weekly don’t see the need to clamber up on to the Info Highway, we’re surely doomed to permanent irrelevance. Or think of it this way: should anyone doubt the substance of what I’ve had to say about how the academy both blocks and enables access to the realms of public policy, just reread <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/cyclical">Jamie Owen Daniel’s</a> eloquent and searching analysis of Negt and Kluge alongside her account of life as an assistant professor, and ask yourself: now, isn’t there something obscene about an academic habitus that requires its inhabitants to write about “the public sphere” while forbidding them from actually participating in it?</p>
<p>My argument about academe and the American left is simply this: there are all kinds of things that prevent left-leaning academics from having greater impact on the policies that shape our lives, and “academic language” (a/k/a “jargon” to Jacoby and Dickstein) is only one relatively unimportant aspect of these. I couldn’t care less about jargon qua jargon; every domain has its languages, and there’s no reason for anyone to expect any one of them to be universally “accessible.” But I really am asking that we reconceive the terms of academic professionalism, academic peer review, and academic influence on the American left. Pace Marjorie Perloff, this isn’t simply a matter of worrying whether a magazine is mucking with your prose. From where I sit, my work on “public access,” my tirades against the Right, and my attention to graduate education and the collapse of the academic job market are all part of the same project: to change the terms by which academics in the humanities interact with extra-academic publics. Everything else is just comic relief.</p>
<p>University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/michael-berube">michael berube</a>, <a href="/tags/cary-wolfe">Cary Wolfe</a>, <a href="/tags/tabbi">tabbi</a>, <a href="/tags/gitlin">Gitlin</a>, <a href="/tags/john-patrick-diggins">John Patrick Diggins</a>, <a href="/tags/habermas">habermas</a>, <a href="/tags/public-sphere">public sphere</a>, <a href="/tags/stanley-fish">stanley fish</a>, <a href="/tags/jacoby">jacoby</a>, <a href="/tags/kirkpatrick-sale">Kirkpatrick Sale</a>, <a href="/tags/neil-postman">Neil Postman</a>, <a href="/tags/dickstein">dickstein</a>, <a href="/tags/cnn">cnn</a>, <a href="/tags/nancy-fraser">Nancy Fraser</a>, <a href="/tags/john-rawls">john rawls</a>, <a href="/tags/michael-lind">michael lind</a>, <a href="/tags/capitalism">capitalism</a>, <a href="/tags/nationalism">nationalism</a>, <a href="/tags/selling-out">selling out</a>, <a href="/tags/left-intellectua">left intellectua</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator908 at http://electronicbookreview.comGetting the Dirt on The Public Intellectual: A response to Michael Bérubéhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/leftsystemic
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Cary Wolfe</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">1996-04-01</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/criticalecologies/outselling">Cultural Criticism and The Politics of Selling Out</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Before I get going, let me say I’m glad people like Michael Bérubé are out there doing what they do. Those of us on the left who aren’t out front doing the dirty work in the so-called public sphere should think twice and probably thrice before we go chastising those who, like Bérubé, spend much time and energy patiently responding (in Bérubé’s case with great good humor) to the Lynn Cheyneys of the world. So I want my comments here to be taken in a spirit of solidarity with Bérubé’s efforts and even, in some cases, with his specific reservations and suggestions. Foremost among my points of agreement is Bérubé’s rejection, on the one hand, of “the new discourse of the so-called ‘public intellectual’ ” as deployed by Russell Jacoby and others, and, on the other hand, of the position held by Mas’ud Zavarzadeh and others that the intellectual who attempts to engage the dominant rhetoric of the social and cultural moment and play “inside the system according to the rules of reform” is automatically a stooge for the powers that be.</p>
<p>Both of these extremes, it seems to me, have long since been shown wanting by critiques such as Frank Lentricchia’s under-read <span class="booktitle">Criticism and Social Change</span> (U of Chicago P, 1988), which shows how Kenneth Burke’s career makes a mockery of both extremes, and in so doing provides a model for what I think Bérubé has in mind when he uses the term “public intellectual.” The example of Burke as read by Lentricchia confirms Bérubé’s suspicion that when Jacoby and others attack the “narrowness” and “careerism” of other intellectuals, what they are really attacking (under the cover of arguing that specialization undermines public duty) is what is usually called “theory.” The example of Burke shows how the view of a zero-sum game between “theory” and public intellectual “practice” perpetuated by the discourse of the “public intellectual” is wrongheaded. Burke, after all, was doing grand theory long before it had a name - and not just in the well-known pair of books on motives, but way back in the thirties, in difficult and ambitious books like <span class="booktitle">Attitudes Toward History</span> and <span class="booktitle">Permanence and Change</span>. And he was a “generalist” who wrote for “nonspecialist journals” (and penned a few literary texts of his own as well). What the example of Burke tells us is not, as Jacoby et al. would have it, that one pursuit is better than another; what it tells us is that each needs the other to keep it honest.</p>
<p>I think this is something close to Bérubé’s bottom line, and it is a bottom line I heartily endorse. But I also think that Bérubé needs to be reminded (as I intend to remind him here) that the theory side, the “intellectual” side, of this productive mutual antagonism tends to receive short shrift in his emphasis on the intellectual’s need to address public policy. It has always been difficult to wear both hats, and almost nobody these days can wear both supremely well, in part because of the “functional differentiation” of modern society (to use Niklas Luhmann’s term) which calls into question the very idea of the “public intellectual” - a point I will return to in some detail below. On the left, Edward Said and maybe a few others come to mind as exceptions, people who get a hearing in the major media and are taken as serious, cutting edge forces by those with academic expertise. This doesn’t prove either side right, as Jacoby et al. think. What it means is that the public intellectual wannabes need to listen when the theory aficionados tell them they’re trafficking in unexamined or discredited assumptions and posting specious arguments; and the theory-hounds need to listen when the public intellectuals tell them that it would be nice if they could make themselves as understandable as possible to as many readers as possible, even at the expense of sometimes rounding off a few corners, lest they be condemned to preaching to a very small choir.</p>
<p>So much for the first position rejected by Bérubé. As for the second, I must confess that I haven’t read the essay by Zavarzadeh he cites, so I’ll just have to assume that Bérubé’s recounting is reasonably accurate. If it is, Zavarzadeh’s contention strikes me as an all-too-familiar sort of critical dogma which is politically idealistic and intellectually simplistic in the stark Manichaean contrast it paints between the purity of the revolutionary intellectual, who alone understands and represents the true interests of “the people,” and the ideologically contaminated “public intellectual” who thinks that gains may be made by seizing what Burke calls the “ruling symbols” and putting them to progressive political work. It is not so easy - it has never been so easy - to draw the sorts of rigid lines that Zavarzadeh wants to draw between the “revolutionary” and the “reformist,” the “local” and the “global,” being “inside” the “system” and being “outside” of it, and so on. How does this sort of framework help us make sense of, say, Louis Farrakan? Dave Foreman? Pat Buchanan? The Simpson trial? Madonna? It might seem tempting to excuse this sort of procrusteanism on the grounds of political commitment. But this, I think, would be overly-generous, for as Lentricchia writes of the lesson we can draw from Burke for the would-be politically-engaged intellectual,</p>
<p class="longQuotation">To attempt to proceed in purity - to reject the rhetorical strategies of capitalism and Christianity, <span class="lightEmphasis">as if such strategies were in themselves responsible for human oppression</span> - to proceed with the illusion of purity is to situate oneself on the margin of history… It is to exclude oneself from having any chance of making a difference for better or worse (36).</p>
<p>My skepticism toward Zavarzadeh’s position should not be taken, however, as indicating any reduced emphasis on the issues of class, capital, and commodification hovering around the edges of the passage quoted by Bérubé. In fact, I will eventually want to suggest that this is precisely one of the registers in which Bérubé himself might want to think in more detail about the politics of “selling out,” the role - perhaps I should say the possibility - of the public intellectual, and, especially, the trade-offs involved in endorsing a certain brand of nationalism. The extent to which such a commitment might be compatible with the fundamentally liberal humanist framework (left liberal humanist, to be sure) within which Bérubé seems currently to be operating is, I think, one of the most pressing questions of all for Bérubé’s project, at least in the long run.</p>
<p>At the core of Bérubé’s argument is his contention that “cultural studies, if it is going to be anything more than just…another option in the salad bar at the theory-school cafeteria, must direct its attention to the local and national machinery of public policy. I want to argue,” he continues,</p>
<p class="longQuotation">that Henry Giroux is right to claim, in his most recent essays, that cultural studies intellectuals aspire to the status of public intellectuals precisely because they conceive of the university as “a major public sphere that influences large numbers of people.” “Teaching and writing,” Bérubé concludes, “are two important ways of being public; but what I want to call for is a practice of cultural studies that articulates the theoretical and critical work of the so-called public intellectual to the movements of public policy.”</p>
<p>Aside from pointing out that Bérubé’s dismissive comment about the “theory school salad bar” makes him sound a lot more like the Jacoby/Dickstein line than he ought to be comfortable with, I can best state my differences with his view of the situation by citing a simple facts: most of the philosophical underpinnings needed to rhetorically mobilize a constituency in the public sphere toward progressive policy initiatives have been subjected to disabling critique in the theoretical work of many of those who would frame such a rhetoric. As Bill Rasch and I have argued elsewhere, <span class="lightEmphasis">maybe</span> the fundamental problem for the politically attuned left intellectual right now is that the past 20 years have witnessed a powerful theoretical critique of representationalism in its various forms - that is, of the idea that some statements and interpretations are to be judged better than others because they more accurately and transparently reflect the true nature of a pre-given reality “as it is” before the interpreter and her discourse arrives on the scene (and the optical metaphor here is very much to the point, as Richard Rorty pointed out some time ago in <span class="booktitle">Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature</span>). For idealists, that pre-given reality is in the structure of the mind or, in a certain variation, in the structure of language or discourse itself; for realists, it is in the “objective” structure of the world. But the past few decades have seen, in almost every area of the human sciences, the building of a very persuasive case indeed for the contingency and socially-constructed nature of all knowledge - a case, that is, against representationalism in all its forms. At first, the critique of representationalism seemed liberating for the left intellectual, for if it could be shown that any hegemonic discourse was contingent and not “grounded” in the usual sense, then it was easy to imagine that a different (i.e. more just) hegemony might be established. The problem, of course, is that once you have appealed to a social constructionist argument, and thereby kicked the theoretical foundations out from under those who pretend their power is grounded in the very order of things, you have also put your own (putatively more progressive) claims in jeopardy as well, insofar as those claims need a foundationalist philosophical ground to be effective.</p>
<p>Think, for example, of how powerful the Enlightenment rhetoric of universal human rights is in various debates within the public sphere. And then remind yourself how each of these three terms - “universal,” “human,” and “rights” - has been carefully and systematically subjected to radical critique by many of the major intellectual developments in the human sciences of the past 30 years. Almost all progressive movements (and some not so progressive ones) find it effective to trade upon the rhetoric of “rights.” But in what sort of position does the left intellectual find herself when she remembers that the notion of “rights” has a quite historically, philosophically, and politically specific (i.e. liberal) lineage, that there is nothing natural about it, and that to appeal to equal rights under the law as a progressive social strategy is (as our Marxist friends remind us) to perpetuate the illusion that equality in the legal sphere solves rather than masks the problem of inequality in the economic sphere - all of which was powerfully played out alongside the dramas of gender and race in the Simpson trial?</p>
<p>And imagine now that how the left intellectual negotiates this problem - the discrepancy between what she knows is rhetorically effective in the public sphere and what she knows, philosophically and theoretically, about that rhetoric - is different in each of the instances invoked above by Bérubé and Giroux: writing an article (<span class="booktitle">Harper’s</span> or <span class="booktitle">boundary 2</span>?), teaching (graduate or undergraduate?), addressing one’s professional peers (field conference or AAUP meeting?), and so on. The problem is this: even if we agree with Bérubé, as I do, that cultural studies intellectuals ought to address public policy more than they do, it remains the case that different audiences, to be moved or persuaded, require different and even incompatible rhetorical strategies, and those multiple forms of address must still be reconciled with what the intellectual knows - as an intellectual, theorist, and critic - about those rhetorical terms.</p>
<p>I hasten to add that this is not simply a matter of intellectual fashion, as the Jonathan Yardleys of the world like to say, nor is it a matter of simply having been at the “theory school salad bar” so long that one experiences permanently paralyzing existential aporia over the cole slaw (creamy or chopped?). The problem is that the left public intellectual finds herself in a schizophrenic situation. But it is a schizophrenic situation, as so many influential theorists of “the postmodern condition” have suggested, that the rest of society shares - and shares structurally, not simply because of a bad attitude. It is possible to imagine, I suppose (as Jurgen Habermas does), that all of these different discourses and sites add up to and are rationally reconciled in something called a “public sphere,” but looking around me I see no reason, other than sheer utopian longing, to think that it is so.</p>
<p>A more persuasive account of our current situation is offered, I think, by Niklas Luhmann’s theory of “functional differentiation,” which argues that modern and postmodern societies (the distinction is of little moment for him) are made up of discrete and self-referential but nevertheless interlinked systems - legal, educational, economic, political, and so on - none of which (including that in which the intellectual operates) may provide a privileged perspective on society as a whole. Social systems, as a condition of their self-reproduction (or “autopoiesis”), must respond selectively and reductively (in terms of their own operational codes) to an environment that is always already more complex than any single system - which is why, for example, animal rights organizations who want companies to stop testing cosmetics on animals realize that all the moral appeals in the world will not be as effective as organizing product boycotts (corporations are by definition in business to make money, and the moral code is strictly speaking beside the operational point). As Dietrich Schwanitz explains, the Luhmannian account of functional differentiation means that</p>
<p class="longQuotation">society is no longer regarded as the sum of its parts, but as a combination of system-environment differentiations… The individual human being belongs to each of these functionally differentiated subsystems for only short periods of time with only limited aspects of his person depending on his respective role as a voter, pupil, reader, patient, or litigant. It is his fundamental exclusion from society that allows the occasional re-entry of the individual under particular circumstances.</p>
<p>Several important points would seem to follow from this view, most of which complicate considerably the role and even possibility of Bérubé’s public intellectual. The first and most obvious is a radical questioning of the very idea of the “public sphere” itself. As Eva Knodt points out, while Habermas - and, one would have to think, Bérubé - “insists on grounding modern society in the archimedian point of a rationally motivated consensus, the principle of functional differentiation entails the absence of such a center and, by implication, the impossibility of a totalizing consciousness or collective identity on the model of a transcendental subject or of a linguistically grounded intersubjectivity.” This is so, Luhmann argues, because one cannot “reestablish the totality of the system within the system. The whole cannot be a part of the whole at the same time. Any attempt of this kind would merely create a difference in the system: the difference of that part which represents the totality of the system within the system vis-a-vis all the other parts.”</p>
<p>What this means, then, is that in functionally differentiated society there is no public sphere because there is no public, no space within which society is the “sum of its parts,” no archimedian vantage from which the differences between different function systems, codes, discourses, and language games can be adjudicated. (There is, to be sure, that mass media concoction and addressee called “the public,” but that, as Baudrillard and others have reminded us, is a very different matter indeed from Bérubé’s “public.”) So even if it is true, as Bérubé argues, that “conservative public intellectuals see it as integral to their enterprise to undermine the idea of the public in the realm of public policy,” doing away with the idea of “the public” is not necessarily conservative. Indeed, it could be argued that it is crucial to leftist political strategy to understand above all, as the Right apparently does more effectively, the passing of the public sphere and the specific demands of the different function systems and their codes that those who would intervene must engage. This is all the more true in light of the fact, as Harro Müller reminds us, that “the participants in each respective system tend to overestimate their own possibilities and project them in inadmissible ways. Representatives of the political system always tie the power code to the moral code and stylize themselves as representatives of the common interest. In aesthetic discourse, it is a favorite rhetorical strategy to promote oneself as the mouthpiece of authentic experiences which are then generalized across systems.” Indeed, Bérubé would seem to admit as much - and thereby recognize the fact of functional differentiation - when he quite rightly observes that “The 104th Congress is going about the business of dismantling social programs despite the fact that one radical conservative claims natural, biological sanction for doing so, and another radical conservative explicitly rejects that reasoning yet comes to the same conclusion.”</p>
<p>It probably goes without saying that the view I’ve been outlining makes it difficult if not impossible to talk about the representative intellectual - the “public intellectual” - in the way that Bérubé imagines. But I’ll say it anyway, because for Bérubé to ground the efficacy of the work of the intellectual in the extent to which it purportedly represents the “true” interests of the public brings him closer to the positions of both Jacoby <span class="lightEmphasis">and</span> Zavarzadeh than he wants to be: to Jacoby because it forces Bérubé to say that his contention that the most important intellectuals are “people like him” is not just a pragmatic or rhetorical one (which in my view is acceptable and indeed unavoidable), but is grounded (and here he falls in with Zavarzadeh) in what is finally an organic link to the true interests of the public, the people, the workers, or whatever.</p>
<p>What I’ve just said amounts to rejecting the line that runs from Habermas through folks like Nancy Fraser and other good leftists which says that only if you have a normative account can you complain about anything or offer more progressive social solutions. You don’t need to believe or feel compelled to prove that you are representing the “true” interests of the people or the public sphere to argue, in a variety of contexts, that homelessness is a bad thing, that universal single payer health coverage is a good idea, or that the redistribution of wealth in the US ever more upward is socially disastrous and makes a mockery of the values even conservatives say they hold dear. All you can do - all <span class="lightEmphasis">anybody</span> can do - is offer the most persuasive and compelling arguments you can for the views you support. Appealing to a “ground” for those beliefs may be good rhetorical practice in certain situations, but such appeals should, I think, be lightly held and sparingly mobilized.</p>
<p>The problem with <span class="lightEmphasis">this</span> view, as you will have already guessed, is that the terrain negotiated by the public intellectual makes it fairly impossible to do just that. It is hard if <span class="lightEmphasis">not</span> impossible to square off with a William Bennett or a Lynn Cheyney and <span class="lightEmphasis">not</span> make such foundationalist appeals. I agree with Bérubé that this does not mean that left intellectuals should therefore avoid that terrain. But I disagree with him that what this indicates is that we need to be better, more public, “intellectuals.” In my view, it is futile for the intellectual to attempt to “reconcile” the differences systemically required in writing for <span class="booktitle">Harper’s</span> - or even, to put a finer point on it, doing a panel on <span class="booktitle">The News Hour with Jim Lehrer</span> - with writing for <span class="booktitle">boundary 2</span>. If it is true in a sense that to be a public intellectual is to sell out, it is not (as Zavarzadeh thinks) because it is a political sellout, but rather because it is usually (and, in some public forums - <span class="booktitle">Capital Gang</span> and the like - <span class="lightEmphasis">always</span>) an intellectual sellout. In this light it is thus not primarily, as Bérubé thinks, the failure of left intellectuals to address public policy that separates the wheat from the chaff; it is not as if right wing intellectuals, in addressing public policy, have a more accurate read on the relationship of the “intellectual” and the “public.” What they do have is a more accurate - or rather more effective - read on how to use the mass media and adapt to its systemic requirements. Right wing intellectuals know how to get into what Washington media insiders call “the golden Rolodex” and stay there.</p>
<p>What this means, then, is not that we need to be more public- or policy-minded intellectuals, but that we need to be more savvy media manipulators, sound-bite rhetoricians, and, sometimes, snake oil salesmen and demagogues for causes we deem worthy - and this <span class="lightEmphasis">includes</span> mobilizing incoherent or historically obsolete terms like “the public sphere.” The problem, of course, is that most intellectuals went into their line of work in the first place because of a deep distaste for and distrust of this sort of thing. Hence, it’s no surprise that public intellectuals aren’t exactly falling off of trees.</p>
<p>The account I’ve just given, framed by the idea of “functionally differentiated” society, thus gives me a way to agree and disagree with Bérubé all at once. I agree with him that many of us should address public policy more than we do; but I disagree with him that the problem with left <span class="lightEmphasis">intellectuals</span> is what amounts to a failure of will or a seduction by an “avant-garde tradition.” Being cognizant of functional differentiation allows me to be skeptical “that intellectual work in cultural studies should seek to have an impact on the mundane and quotidian world of public policy” (emph. mine), while at the same time agreeing with Bérubé that it is idealistic in the extreme and politically a dead-end to hold that negotiating “with mainstream print media in civil society” is “a form of capitulation to capitalism.” For these reasons, Bérubé’s call for “a practice of cultural studies that articulates the theoretical and critical work of the so-called public intellectual to the movements of public policy” is and will forever remain strategically vague, because in functionally differentiated society theory cannot ground practice in this way. All theory and practice can do is beat each other up and keep each other honest. To use Luhmannian language, theory and practice can only serve as the more complex environment to the other’s always already reductive and selective system, perturbing it, forcing it to adapt, to deal. The “public intellectual” who goes “public” on <span class="booktitle">The News Hour with Jim Lehrer</span> and ceases to be “intellectual” needs people like me to beat him over the head with theory to make him examine more closely the implications of the dire rhetorical moves he is surely going to have to make to get any political work done; and he is going to have to beat me over the head with whether my interest in Deleuze’s <span class="booktitle">The Fold</span> is really anything other than elitist navel-gazing.</p>
<p>Having said all that, one very important problem remains, for even those left intellectuals who would happily make such foundationalist appeals - who would happily sell the snake oil and do the demagoguery - show up nowhere on television and only occasionally in the major print media. What does it mean, after all, when Doris Kearns Goodwin and Clarence Page are trotted out as representatives of “the left” on the <span class="booktitle">Lehrer News Hour</span>, or when Irwin Knoll (god rest his soul) appears on that same show as, next to the de facto norm, quaintly lunatic fringe? And all of this on a program the right likes to point to as the quintessence of all that’s wrong with the “liberal media.” I agree with Bérubé that left intellectuals need to get better at these things, but the problem is that even if they do get better, the mass media codes which dictate what counts as “reasonable” or “responsible” commentary are such that, as Said warns, the intellectual who attempts to engage them on behalf of a more progressive truth may find herself the tool of the very system he means to oppose, the token testament to the system’s open-mindedness and democratic accessibility.</p>
<p>We don’t need to concoct lurid conspiracies between the corporate bosses who own the major media and their journalistic lackeys to explain the situation, but it isn’t convincing to explain this state of affairs solely by reference to the codes of functional differentiation either. It’s not as if Ted Turner reads Linden Soles’ copy before each telecast, but neither is it simply the code of journalistic integrity and fair reporting that made CBS decide to stop going after the tobacco industry. In both instances, the undertheorized term is power. In the first scenario, it is too centralized and is forced to do too much work; in the second, it is too decentralized and is doing no work at all.</p>
<p>What this means is that there is, as Bérubé well realizes, a more systematic relationship between the economic, cultural, and media systems than Luhmann’s theory of functional differentiation can account for. As I’ve argued elsewhere, it is a kind of liberal technocratic utopianism to imagine that we live in a society composed of horizontally adjacent function systems, each realizing its own complexity, with no single system exerting asymmetrical or hierarchically organizing pressure on all the others. Instead, it appears to be the case that we find ourselves in a kind of hybrid society, an uneven mixture (to use Raymond Williams’ terms) of “residual” hierarchical, center-periphery organization (according to class, capital, and the priority of the economic system) typical of traditional societies, and “emergent” fully functionally-differentiated social organization typically associated with what we call “postmodernism.” I am thus inclined to agree with Andrew Arato’s contention that Luhmann’s theory of functional differentiation turns out to be “wrong in a crucial sense”:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Despite his correct appraisal of the growth of differentiated and specialized publics, and of a whole range of arguments advanced by the young Habermas concerning the transformation of the non-specialized public under the impact of democratization, corporatism, the culture industry, public relations and propaganda, the non-specialized public has hardly disappeared… [T]here is in all democratic countries an important sphere in which politicians, intellectuals and others continue to discuss and debate politics on a high level and not without political effect.</p>
<p>This amounts to splitting the difference between Luhmann’s view and what I take to be Bérubé’s, at which point, as I’ve already indicated, one would want to argue about just how “high” that level is and dwell for a moment upon the tellingly-hedged “not without political effect” pointed to by Arato.</p>
<p>In the end, then, some of my differences with Bérubé are, as they say, “merely theoretical,” and some are not. But one theoretical difference that is not “merely” anything is the set of reservations I want to lodge about Bérubé’s appeal to “nationalism.” I am as frustrated as Bérubé is by the endless partitioning and factionalizing of the cultural left, and I too think that near the top of the agenda is to explore ways to unify the left that most of us can live with. In this light, it is not at all clear - given the associations of “nationalism” in the current moment and the cultural work it has done and is doing in the Balkans, Russia, and many another locale - that one can take on all of the political and historical freight of that term and turn it into an asset, even if it has obvious rhetorical benefits. (Indeed, one would think Bérubé would be deeply skeptical of such an endeavor, given his historically embedded reading of Grossberg). Second, espousing “nationalism” or even “patriotism” - even if one rejects Richard Rorty’s recent and sillier invocations of these notions as a stick to beat the left with - is deeply problematic for one as attuned as Bérubé appears to be to the relations between multinational capitalism, the wellbeing of the public sphere, and mass media. To invoke nationalism as a way to defend access to housing and health care gives us no way to defend ourselves against the charge that we are rhetorically ballasting a process whereby America takes care of its own at the expense of those outside the borders. That, after all, is how multinational capitalism works.</p>
<p>Thus, I think Bérubé is right to admit that “in focusing on national identity I may be simply proposing nationalism as a refuge from capitalism.” And in this connection, the left’s largely chilly reception of Michael Lind’s <span class="booktitle">The Next American Nation</span>, despite its emphasis on the primacy of class, should stand as fair warning. In all of these cases, as with the case of Rorty, it is a lot easier to talk about “democracy” than it is to talk about “capitalism,” because to talk about capitalism is to talk about how the freedoms and values that liberal democracy says it wants in civil society are systematically undermined by the economic system that liberalism de facto perpetuates. So it is not that in courting the rhetoric of nationalism, all we have to lose is our “theoretical purity,” as Bérubé puts it. Here and elsewhere, Bérubé needs to be reminded that the danger of “purity” is not only one of too much theory; it is also one of too little.</p>
<p>——————————————————————————–</p>
<h2>Works consulted</h2>
<p>See Cary Wolfe and William Rasch, “Introduction: The Politics of Systems and Environments,” <span class="booktitle">Cultural Critique 30</span> (Spring 1995): 5-13.</p>
<p>Dietrich Schwanitz, “Systems Theory According to Niklas Luhmann - Its Environment and Conceptual Strategies,” <span class="booktitle">Cultural Critique</span> 30 (Spring 1995): 145.</p>
<p>Eva Knodt, “Toward a Non-Foundationalist Epistemology: The Habermas/Luhmann Controversy Revisited,” <span class="booktitle">New German Critique</span> 61 (Winter 1994): 98.</p>
<p>Harro Muller, “Luhmann’s Systems Theory as a Theory of Modernity,” New <span class="booktitle">German Critique</span> 61 (Winter 1994): 45.</p>
<p>Cary Wolfe: “Making Contingency Safe for Liberalism: The Pragmatics of Epistemology in Rorty and Luhmann,” <span class="booktitle">New German Critique</span> 61 (Winter 1994): 101-127.</p>
<p>Andrew Arato, “Civil Society and Political Theory,” <span class="booktitle">New German Critique</span> 61 (Winter 1994): 139.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/zavarzadeh">Zavarzadeh</a>, <a href="/tags/russell-jacoby">Russell Jacoby</a>, <a href="/tags/frank-lentricchia">Frank Lentricchia</a>, <a href="/tags/kenneth-burke">Kenneth Burke</a>, <a href="/tags/niklas-luhmann">Niklas Luhmann</a>, <a href="/tags/edward-said">Edward Said</a>, <a href="/tags/henry-giroux">Henry Giroux</a>, <a href="/tags/dickstein">dickstein</a>, <a href="/tags/bill-rasch">Bill Rasch</a>, <a href="/tags/richard-rorty">Richard Rorty</a>, <a href="/tags/jonathan-yardley">Jonathan Yardley</a>, <a href="/tags/jurgen-habermas">Jurgen Habermas</a>, <a href="/tags/dietrich-schwanitz">Dietrich Schwanitz</a>, <a href="/tags/eva-knodt">eva knodt</a>, <a href="/tags/baudrillard">baudrillard</a>, <a href="/tags/harro-muller">Harro Muller</a>, <a href="/tags/nancy-fraser">Nancy Fraser</a>, <a href="/tags/deleu">Deleu</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator807 at http://electronicbookreview.comCultural Criticism and The Politics of Selling Outhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/outselling
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Michael Bérubé</div>
</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">1996-03-15</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>I’d like to begin by explaining why this isn’t the essay I had originally intended to write. When, in 1994, I was asked to address the subject of cultural studies and the public sphere, I assumed that I was being asked to do so partly because my work has addressed the relations between academic and popular knowledges: the university in the public sphere, the university as a public sphere. I haven’t forged any bold, fresh models of cultural studies, I haven’t proposed brand new roles for Western intellectuals, and I honestly couldn’t come up with a supple new theoretical account of subjectivity if I tried. But I have written a few essays for non-academic publications, and these have tried to address some conception of “the public” both thematically and materially. So at first, I thought I might discuss what kind of “selling out” such writing entails, partly because it involves a great deal of negotiating with editors about almost every aspect of an essay, multiple rewrites, and hour-long conversations about individual sentences and paragraphs. The extent (and length) of these negotiations is quite considerable, and I am somewhat surprised that so few people have remarked on the difference between academic and freelance writing in this regard. And in the course of discussing “selling out” in this sense, I thought I would try to put some necessary distance between myself and the new discourse of the so-called “public intellectual,” by explaining that I do not share that discourse’s assumptions about critical language, professionalism, the history of the American intelligentsia in the twentieth century, or, for that matter, its assumptions about the constitution of “the public.”</p>
<p>In other words, I had intended to play on the ambivalence of the phrase, “selling out,” which could mean either abandoning one’s principles and caving in to the demands of the market, <span class="lightEmphasis">or</span>, more happily, creating the conditions under which academic cultural criticism could reach so wide an audience as to create what the sports and entertainment industries call a capacity crowd. In that sense, I live to see the day when mass-market bookstores find it impossible to keep adequate supplies of the latest book from Stuart Hall or Michael Denning: just as <span class="booktitle">The Bell Curve</span> or <span class="booktitle">See, I Told You So</span> has sold out in many stores, so too should intellectuals in cultural studies hope to sell out. Or so I was going to say. My essay, then, as I first envisioned it, would have emphasized the differences between the New Right and the academic left with regard to the <span class="lightEmphasis">dissemination and distribution</span> of cultural criticism: no sooner does Simon and Schuster publish Christina Hoff Sommers’s <span class="booktitle">Who Stole Feminism?</span> than right-wing flacks like Mona Charen and Harry Stein are singing its praises in syndicated newspaper columns and the “On Values” page of <span class="journaltitle">TV Guide</span> (a publication whose circulation exceeds even that of <span class="journaltitle">Critical Inquiry</span>, so I’m told). Of course, I know that the right has better distribution networks than we do for many reasons, partly because they have all the money and almost full control of the liberal media. Nonetheless, I wanted to say, the academic left is producing a great deal of quite valuable and searching cultural criticism, but, as Edward Said (1982) famously remarked, it doesn’t tend to circulate to more than three thousand people, most of whom don’t need to be convinced of the merits of the cultural work of the cultural left.</p>
<p>Now, I will argue something like this in the course of this essay, but quite recently my relation to the discourse of the public intellectual has changed enough to make it difficult for me simply to propose that cultural studies intellectuals do more “public” writing. As of the fall of 1994 I had published a handful of essays in the still-somewhat-alternative <span class="journaltitle">Village Voice</span>, where I could assume a readership with political sensibilities at least broadly similar to mine. Then in the last months of the year I had essays accepted by more “mainstream” publications like <span class="journaltitle">Harper’s</span> and <span class="journaltitle">The New Yorker</span> - magazines that, unlike the <span class="journaltitle">Voice</span>, are printed on glossy paper and are indexed in the <span class="booktitle">Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature</span>. In each case, I wondered whether, in order to appear in such venues, I would have to do some measure of selling out - as an academic, as a fire-breathing progressive, whatever. And this was a weird feeling for someone who’s argued, like Gerald Graff, in favor of our co-optation by the “mainstream.”</p>
<p>So I think it would be fatuous of me to stress the necessity of doing “public intellectual” writing, as if this were a matter of simple volition; I think there’s something deeply unsavory in the work of Russell Jacoby, Harold Fromm, and (occasionally) Morris Dickstein on this subject, as if these people were merely haranguing us (as they usually are) for not being more like them. <cite id="note_1">The ironies here are worth contemplating: Jacoby et al. have spent much of their careers lambasting other critics for their narrow “careerism” and calling for the return of the generalist critic who wrote for nonspecialist journals. When someone like myself takes them up on the challenge, however, they respond with disdain and vituperation; Jacoby’s essay in Telos opens, in fact, by labelling me an elitist snob. Whether Jacoby’s move here is opportunist, careerist, or just plain dishonest I leave to others to decide.</cite> Jacoby especially, to judge from his latest work, which hasn’t changed in tone or content from the stuff he was doing ten years ago, still regards himself as the arbiter of clarity, the only liberal intellectual in the country capable of understanding real people and their real needs. (What’s paradoxical about “Journalists, Cynics and Cheerleaders” (1993), one of his latest attacks on the inaccessibility of the academic left, is that it was first published in his own house journal, <span class="journaltitle">Telos</span>, whose circulation is even lower than that of <span class="journaltitle">TV Guide</span>. Thankfully for Jacoby, <span class="journaltitle">Harper’s</span> picked up the essay and reprinted a part of it in September 1994, or Jacoby would’ve found himself posing as the very model of a modern public intellectual before the two dozen readers of those magazines, limited as it is, did indeed involve some kind of selling out - a kind of selling out that has impelled me to think anew about the potential and actual relations between cultural studies intellectuals in the academy and the discourses of cultural politics and social policy currently popular in the United States. What is of greatest moment to me in this regard, what seems to me the signal crisis in these actual and potential relations, concerns the idea of the national “public” itself, and the status of this idea in an era when public housing, public education, public health, public ownership, public welfare, and public funding for television, the arts, and the humanities have all come under savage attack from our so-called national leaders.</p>
<p>In this climate it is deeply disturbing to me how successfully both wings of the New Right, the economic-libertarian and the cultural-fascist wings, have been able to attack “the public” in the name of the people; this seems to me a new and virulent strain of authoritarian populism the antidote to which we have not yet been able to imagine. But it is also deeply disturbing to me that there is so much skepticism and outright disdain, among the academic left, directed at the proposal that intellectual work in cultural studies should seek to have an impact on the mundane and quotidian world of public policy. When American cultural studies theorizes “the everyday,” it appears, “the everyday” does not always involve school breakfast programs, disability law, or the minimum wage. I’ll get back to this line of argument in a moment; first, I want to explain how I have had to sell out, and then I want to say a few words about the avant-garde tradition that still influences many American left intellectuals, a tradition in which negotiating with the state, with the ISAs, or with mainstream print media in civil society is considered not as one of the obligations of citizenship but as a form of capitulation to capitalism.</p>
<p>My encounter with <span class="journaltitle">Harper’s</span> is not especially germane to this talk, except that insofar as it broached the subject of human disabilities and the discourse of genetic foundationalism (it’s about my son James, who has Down Syndrome), it did attempt to intervene in the neo-eugenicist debates surrounding <span class="booktitle">The Bell Curve</span>; I felt as if I were aiming a pea shooter at the Charles Murray think tank. But it’s worth noting that when I sent the essay to <span class="journaltitle">Harper’s</span> at the suggestion of a friend, the first thing I was told was that it would have to be cut in half, and most of the citations would have to go. My editor, a smart and judicious young woman, informed me that she had an extremely stringent criterion for magazine essays: ideally, she said, you should be done reading them before you realize you’ve begun. She is not averse, she explained, to sinuous narratives, patient excursuses, or carefully modulated philosophical deliberations - except in magazine essays, which should seem so effortlessly written as to betoken an equally effortless task of reading. I had some reason to worry whether my essay would pass that kind of muster, and whether I should ask it to; the article was originally written for an academic collection of essays, and was full of excursuses and deliberations on evolution, meliorism, and the survival value of intelligence. My opening sentence was “Down Syndrome does not exist; what exists are the practices by which we know and produce Down Syndrome” - a sentence I thought anyone familiar with American cultural studies would recognize as an allusion to Douglas Crimp’s citation of François Delaporte at the opening of <span class="booktitle">AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism</span>. Needless to say, that sentence had no allusive force whatsoever for the hypothetical readers of <span class="journaltitle">Harper’s</span>, and I was advised to cut the opening few pages on social constructionism and replace them with the story of my son’s birth.</p>
<p>I agreed to almost all of the most severe editorial suggestions, and the result was actually a much tighter, much less self-indulgent essay, one whose most important theoretical points about genetics and language I was forced to embed in my narrative rather than appending to the narrative. But oddly enough, I found myself accused of selling out nonetheless, by a colleague who told me that he liked the piece except for what he called the sellout to liberal humanism in the final two paragraphs. For him, it was as if I had had to attach those paragraphs before <span class="journaltitle">Harper’s</span> would accept the essay. As it happens, those two paragraphs had been in the essay right from the start; I had imagined them as attempts to negotiate the work of feminist Habermasians with the work of biolinguist Stephen Pinker (and I had had a long conversation with the editor about what this negotiation entailed). <cite id="note_2">See Pinker (1994) and Benhabib, Butler, Cornell and Fraser (1995).</cite> Accordingly, I told my colleague that matters were even worse than he thought: I actually believe my conclusion that we should sign unto others as we would have them sign unto us. That’s no sellout, I said, that’s just me. The only “sellout” was leading the essay with the story of Janet’s labor on the day James was born.</p>
<p><span class="journaltitle">The New Yorker</span> piece presented me with an altogether different, and more dangerous, set of challenges. My assignment was to write a review essay on the emergence of black intellectuals as public intellectuals, focusing specifically on Cornel West, bell hooks, Michael Eric Dyson, Thomas Sowell, and Derrick Bell. (That lineup was hashed out over time; the first draft of my essay also included figures like Skip Gates, Patricia Williams, and Jerry Watts.) Taking the New York intellectuals of the 1940s and 1950s as my point of contrast (Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Philip Rahv, Lionel Trilling), I decided that my job was basically to file a partisan review. And since West and hooks were already academic “celebrities,” I didn’t have to worry about making their work “accessible” to the readers of the New Yorker; I could assume some general knowledge of their work, and proceed to criticize it on its merits, devoting very little time to paraphrase. <cite id="note_3">As the next few pages indicate, my primary concern was that I would be faulted for having sold my subjects short in the pages of a prestigious literary magazine, and that black and nonblack critics alike would thereby read the harshest moments of my review as evidence that the New Yorker would take up such subjects only to dismiss them. Imagine my surprise, then, when in the spring and summer of 1995, as the “new black intellectuals” suddenly became the topic du jour in every major American forum of letters, my article was singled out as an instance of mere “puffery” and “celebrity-mongering” (Wilentz) by writer after writer churning out ever-shabbier essays whose only intellectual substance lay in the charge that other writers on the subject have lacked intellectual substance. To date the subject has seen a great deal of rhetorical posturing and turf-claiming, but as yet, only two essays (Boynton and Rivers) that touch on the question with which my essay concluded, namely, what is the role of the left public intellectual at a time when the idea of “the public” is nearly unthinkable in national public policy? (It is worth noting, for the record, that Robert Boynton wrote his essay almost a year before I wrote mine, but the Atlantic sat on it for quite some time, evidently secure in the belief that nothing important would happen in the world of black intellectuals between 1993 and 1995. Moreover, when the New Yorker ran my essay in January 1995, the Atlantic reportedly considered pulling Boynton’s essay from the March issue - even though it was three times longer than mine and focused on different figures - as if one major essay on black intellectuals would be sufficient for the year.)</cite> My editor at the <span class="journaltitle">New Yorker</span>, Henry Finder (also the managing editor of <span class="journaltitle">Transition</span>), was sympathetic enough to this approach, but turned back my first draft by asking (a) for more detailed argument on the work of Cornel West, and (b) whether I couldn’t be more skeptical of the academic left in general than I had been.</p>
<p>At this point I got nervous, and not merely because of the possible racial politics involved. For one thing, I was familiar with Eric Lott’s stinging review of West’s <span class="booktitle">Race Matters in Social Text</span> (1994), and although I had wide areas of agreement with Eric’s essay, particularly with the charge that West comes close to pathologizing the black underclass, I most certainly did not want to adopt Eric’s strategy of attempting to represent the forces of vitality and resistance in the black underclass more fairly than West. It was a risky enough strategy when Eric used it, and I did not like contemplating the prospect of insisting, from the study of my central Illinois home, that the black urban subaltern could speak in ways Cornel West wasn’t hearing - as if this should become the method of choice for white critics looking to trump their black colleagues. But more than this, I wondered how I could convey some of my own skepticism about the political effectiveness of the academic left without seeming to dump it all on the heads of people like West, Dyson, and hooks. And, of course, I asked myself whether, in going along with the request to devise a more skeptical conclusion to the review, I was simply selling out. My ambivalence became all the more violent when I opened the <span class="journaltitle">Chronicle of Higher Education</span> of December 14, right in the middle of rewrite number twenty, to find that the “Hot Type” column included a précis of Eric Lott’s <span class="journaltitle">Social Text</span> essay, which began, “Cornel West is in danger of selling out, says Eric Lott” (10). I had read Eric’s essay in manuscript some months before, but I had not anticipated so tangled a course as this: what are the cultural politics involved, I wondered, in the possibility of selling out by joining the growing chorus of voices accusing Cornel West of selling out?</p>
<p>This was not merely a matter of academic politics, of who gets to say what about whom and who will think what of whom as a result. Rather, it was a question involving what Edward Said has called “representations of the intellectual.” Because I had been asked to discuss these figures as public intellectuals, I had decided to base my claims for their work on the fact that they possess a constituency, largely but not wholly African-American in composition, for and to whom they regularly speak; and I meant to juxtapose that sense of constituency to the self-conscious cosmopolitanism of the New York intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s - a cosmopolitanism that helped to establish them as intellectuals, but which, regrettably, often left them unable or unwilling to speak as <span class="lightEmphasis">Jewish</span> intellectuals. <cite id="note_4">For obvious reasons, the conditions for speaking as “a Jewish intellectual” in the United States were radically different after World War II than before. Compared to the prewar <span class="journaltitle">Partisan Review</span> writers, the postwar group was markedly more willing - indeed, sometimes compelled - to speak and write as “Jewish writers.” Particularly moving in this regard was Alfred Kazin’s painful reassessment of the role of the Jewish intellectual in the wake of the Holocaust, a reassessment that began with the essay, “In Every Voice, In Every Ban” in the New Republic. However mistaken Kazin may have been to indict his fellow New York intellectuals for “our silent complicity in the massacre of the Jews,” the point remains that no one writer (or group of writers) can dictate when it is proper or necessary to speak “from” or “for” one’s ethnic identity and when it is preferable to speak as a “cosmopolitan.” See Bloom 1986, esp. pp. 137-39.</cite> Therefore, it seemed to me, the way to discuss the functions of new black intelligentsia, for better <span class="lightEmphasis">and</span> for worse, was to discuss the question of intellectuals’ constituencies. For theorists like Julien Benda, as for a long tradition of avant-garde intellectuals from Henri de Saint-Simon right through to Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, an intellectual who has a constituency is by definition an intellectual who has sold out: the intellectual is he (almost always he) who transcends all affiliations. As Said writes, such intellectuals “have to be thoroughgoing individuals with powerful personalities and, above all, they have to be in a state of almost permanent opposition to the status quo: for all these reasons Benda’s intellectuals are inevitably a small, highly visible group of men - he never includes women - whose stentorian voices and indelicate imprecations are hurled at humankind from on high” (7).</p>
<p>I fancied that my solution to the problem of how to be suitably skeptical of public intellectuals considerably more “public” than myself had a certain attractive recursivity to it: I would sell out by broaching the subject of whether intellectuals with constituencies have sold out to the extent that they “represent” a public at all. And since the intellectuals in question are black, I could broach this question simply by attending to the ways in which they themselves broach the question, for it is a crucial issue for them: “because non-black audiences are still the ones that have the power to put black artists at the top of the charts,” I wrote, “African-American intellectuals’ uneasiness about black commercial and professional success stems in part from the long-standing fear that ‘crossing over’ must entail selling out. It’s what leads to [bell] hooks’ attack on [Spike Lee’s <span class="booktitle">Malcolm X</span> ] [which, she’d written, “cannot be revolutionary and generate wealth at the same time”] - the unstated suspicion that any critical or commercial success with white audiences is, de facto, political failure” (77). And I concluded that “if black intellectuals are legitimated by their sense of a constituency, they’re hamstrung by it, too: they can be charged with betraying that constituency as easily as they can be credited with representing it” (77-78).</p>
<p>All well and good. But as fortune would have it, I had been given a deadline of November 11 for the <span class="journaltitle">New Yorker</span> essay, which meant that I was writing it just as the election returns of November 8 began to be narrated as an epochal moment in postwar American politics, the “romp to the right” (as <span class="journaltitle">USA Today</span> called it) that finally freed the American people from the tyranny of liberal Washington. I therefore decided that it was time for me to unburden myself of some of my latest obsessions about cultural studies, regardless of whether they were apposite to the task at hand: to wit, I would take Thomas Sowell’s <span class="booktitle">Race and Culture: A World View</span> as the occasion to note that “where the left tends to address itself to culture, the right - even when it takes up the topic of ‘culture’ - tends to address itself to policy” (79). This phenomenon is particularly remarkable in Sowell’s book precisely because it claims, at the outset, not to have any designs on practical policymaking; the rest of the book, however, mounts a case (and stop me if you’ve heard this one before) against the evils of the custodial welfare state and the doctrines of cultural relativism in the social sciences, which apparently sustain the welfare state. My concern was, and is, that right-wing intellectuals from Charles Murray to William Kristol to James Q. Wilson seem never to open their mouths but to articulate their versions of “cultural studies” to the exigencies of policymaking, whereas cultural studies theorists on the left often express outright disdain for the policy implications of their work, as did Andrew Ross in a recent interview in <span class="journaltitle">Lingua Franca</span> when he dismissed the task of addressing policy as “a little too easy” (60).</p>
<p>This then has been my fixation since the elections of 1994: configuring the relations among American cultural studies, the latest policy initiatives of the New Right, and the discourse of the public intellectual. I want to argue that cultural studies, if it is going to be anything more than just one more intellectual paradigm for the reading of literary and cultural texts, anything more than another option in the salad bar at the theory-school cafeteria, must direct its attention to the local and national machinery of public policy. I want to argue that Henry Giroux is right to claim, in his most recent essays, that cultural studies intellectuals aspire to the status of public intellectuals precisely because they conceive of the university as “a major public sphere that influences large numbers of people” (241); but I also want to argue that doing academic cultural studies, as currently constituted, is not enough - just as writing a few essays here and there for mass-market magazines is not enough. Teaching and writing are two important ways of being public, and we need to say so whenever we are publicly accused of being insufficiently public; but what I want to call for is a practice of cultural studies that articulates the theoretical and critical work of the so-called public intellectual to the movements of public policy.</p>
<p>One advantage to voicing these concerns in the <span class="journaltitle">New Yorker</span>, I thought, was that it would allow me to chip away at the legend of the New York intellectuals, by pointing out how dismal was their own record in this regard. I beg your indulgence for one more quote from that essay, one which summarizes my concerns about cultural politics while refusing the nostalgic fantasy that Howe and Trilling were giants who walked the land:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">watching the American left redefine the terrain of cultural politics while practical political positions to the left of Bill Clinton disappear from the map, one begins to wonder if there isn’t a sense, even in the work of the most prolific and capable black public intellectuals, that cultural politics is a kind of compensation for practical politics - more satisfying, more supple, more susceptible to sheer intellectual virtuosity, because it involves neither revenues nor statutes. Not that the celebrated New York intellectuals of yesteryear held any clear advantage in the realm of practical politics: Lionel Trilling had no hand in Truman’s Far East policies, nor did Philip Rahv help enforce Brown v. Board of Education. (79-80)</p>
<p>The word “yesteryear” in this last sentence is crucial to the point - since, after all, we now live with the legacy of the New York intellectuals in the form of William Kristol, and it is Norman Podhoretz’s magazine, <span class="journaltitle">Commentary</span>, that has recently defended the brutal beating and murder of gay men on the grounds that it discourages “waverers” from indulging in the gay lifestyle. <cite id="note_5">See Pattullo 1992. Though Pattullo’s odious essay attracted a great deal of criticism from Commentary’s less rabid readers, the magazine itself has not retreated an inch, calling Pattullo’s essay (in a promotional mailing) “the most carefully reasoned argument for maintaining society’s preference for heterosexuality over homosexuality in the teaching of children.”</cite> But I don’t want merely to remark on the sorry transformation of the New York intellectuals into the neo-conservatives; I want also to introduce into our discussions of the “public intellectual” the overdue recognition that the New York intellectuals were often the worst kind of armchair quarterbacks and fence-sitters, “activists” whose only activism consisted of essays in <span class="journaltitle">Dissent</span> or <span class="journaltitle">Partisan Review</span>. Time and again, when crucial social issues were on the table, the New Yorkers elected to pass: and when it came to taking stands on the Vietnam War, on school desegregation and decentralization, on the Women’s Movement, many of the so-called public intellectuals of the 1950s and 1960s compiled a deplorable record. (<span class="journaltitle">The New York Review of Books</span>, for instance, largely opposed the women’s movement but was a strong antiwar voice; Irving Howe, meanwhile, declined to oppose the war at all.)</p>
<p>My point in rattling these old bones is not simply to challenge the lionization of the New York intellectuals, but to raise a question I think is crucial to our own moment, in which the challenge of the would-be public intellectual is precisely to revivify our conception of “the public.” It is remarkable, to say the least, that even moderate Republicans like New Jersey governor Christine Whitman have so successfully elided the rhetoric of public ownership with the rhetoric of government control, as when she suggested, apropos of funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, that the notion of government ownership of media went out with the passing of Pravda. This bizarre logic, I note, has given us not merely a new form of discourse, in which eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts is construed as a means of liberating artists from the shackles of government funding; it has also given us a whole raft of toxic new policy initiatives, from the repeal of laws ensuring environmental protection and workplace safety to the insurance-industry boondoggle known as “tort reform.” And one of the reasons for that, of course, is that conservative public intellectuals see it as integral to their enterprise to undermine the idea of the public in the realm of public policy - which is why the aging Hitler Youth duo of Peter Collier and David Horowitz make sure to send their interventions in cultural politics (namely, the tabloids <span class="journaltitle">Comment</span> and <span class="journaltitle">Heterodoxy</span>) to the offices of Senator Larry Pressler, in order to assist the Senator in the noble quest to gut the public.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, I knew - and know - full well the trouble I invite by suggesting a division between “cultural politics” and “public policy.” With the American left in such woeful disarray, it is all too often that we hear about how the “academic left” or the “cultural left” is obsessed with its readings of Madonna, its barbaric jargon, and its byzantine rituals of theoretical purification. And sure enough, among the first “progressive” responses to the Republican sweep was Michael Tomasky’s cover article for the <span class="journaltitle">Village Voice</span>, blaming the academic left for the rise of Newt:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">so we sit around debating the canon at a handful of elite universities and arguing over Fish’s and Jameson’s influence on the academy, while the vast majority of working-class young people in America (a) will never read the canon, however you choose to define it and whatever you wish to in- or exclude, (b) will think Fish and Jameson stand for a dinner of carp and Irish whiskey (and be little the worse off for thinking it, incidentally), (c) will take very few literature courses, and (d) will be working like hell to save the money to pay their tuitions at a two-year college or perhaps a land-grant university…. (19)</p>
<p>He then goes on to cite who else but Russell Jacoby. Tomasky was promptly rebuked in the pages of his own paper, chiefly by Ellen Willis, but the charge stung precisely because we have heard it so often before, particularly from self- described liberals such as David Bromwich, Daniel Harris, Russell Jacoby, and Richard Rorty. For that matter, the charge that the academic left is too self-absorbed is not wholly without merit; it is simply a different kind of claim from the charge that the academic left is marginal to national politics, or that the academic left is responsible for the 104th Congress. You can blame people for their self-absorption, but you cannot necessarily blame them for being marginal, and articles like Tomasky’s tend to confuse this issue, provoking nothing more productive than defensiveness and academic turf-guarding in response. Likewise, even if I were to enumerate and denounce every kind of academic self-absorption and ineffectuality I know of (and this would take some time), I would still not have shown that any of it was to blame for the latest conservative turn in national politics - a phenomenon we might more plausibly attribute to the malfeasances of elected Democrats and the terrifying mass mobilization of the Christian Coalition.</p>
<p>Whatever my own qualms about the academic left, then, I do not want to be saddled with positions I have not taken: I do not claim that cultural politics isn’t a “real” politics, nor would I claim that struggles over popular culture are unrelated to struggles over public policy. To quote an influential theorist I’ve been reading lately, “it is simply not possible to refocus this nation’s public policy debate through electoral politics alone” (87); moreover, “the left has been very successful because it understands the importance of the culture - of framing the debate and influencing the way people think about problems” (88). For those of you who don’t recognize the prose style, that was Rush Limbaugh. I think he’s got a point, and I think there are many reasons why the academic left devotes so much of its attention to culture. Not least important of these, I submit, is the fact that most citizens of the United States devote more of their attention to culture than to politics; it is no exaggeration to say that most Americans live their relation to the political by way of the cultural, as was amply demonstrated by last year’s public debates over films like <span class="booktitle">Forrest Gump</span> and <span class="booktitle">The Lion King</span>. And, as I’ve argued elsewhere, cultural criticism is ubiquitous on the American political landscape, particularly the kind that proceeds from figures like Michael Medved, Cal Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, William Bennett, and Christina Hoff Sommers, not to mention Peter Collier and David Horowitz. Finally, there’s the eerie fact that the realm of popular culture often seems to offer wiser and more bracing analyses of post-Fordism and the crisis of the American worker than anything ordinary people can find in the political realm. My favorite example here comes from <span class="booktitle">The Simpsons</span>, from an episode in which Homer and a co-worker are representing the company in the state capital, and decide to order room service at their hotel and to put it on the company tab. No sooner do they do so than a red buzzer goes off hundreds of miles away in the office of Mr. Burns, the CEO, whereupon Smithers, Burns’ assistant and sycophant, remarks, “Someone’s ordering room service, sir.” Burns then orders Smithers to release the winged monkeys, and in a brilliant citation of <span class="booktitle">The Wizard of Oz</span>, Burns cackles, “Fly! Fly, my pretties!” But the monkeys crash to the ground almost immediately, provoking Burns to mutter that the program still needs more research. I want to point out that my then 7-year-old son enjoyed this surreal scene every bit as much as I did, which leads me to believe that when it comes to depictions of the post-Fordist economy in which obscenely wealthy CEOs cook up draconian schemes for employee policing, we can say of <span class="booktitle">The Simpsons</span> what Augustine said of the Bible: that its surface attracts us like children and yet its depths are stupendous, rendering its meaning copiously in so few words.</p>
<p>So if it is true that cultural politics sometimes seems like a compensation for practical politics (and it is certainly true in my own life), perhaps this is so because Americans often appear smarter as consumers than as political agents; at the very least, we certainly tend to understand ourselves more readily as consumers than as political agents, which is one reason why, as James Carville has often remarked, so little of the American electorate has any substantial understanding of political issues that do not directly affect their disposable income.</p>
<p>Even in the political arena bounded by the state, however, there is no clear distinction between cultural politics and public policy, and therefore no clear way of determining whether or not “politicizing” an issue is a responsible or irresponsible thing to do. When the Congressional Black Caucus last year sought to “politicize” the President’s crime bill by demanding that it retain a provision on racial justice and the death penalty, they were undoubtedly speaking cultural politics to policy in a manner that should remind us how tenuous is the distinction between the two. But even here we can find two senses of the word “political”: the narrow sense in which the Caucus informed Clinton that he might not have the votes to pass the bill unless he addressed their concerns, and the larger sense in which the Caucus was trying to redirect the subject of race in our national discussions of crime and punishment, such that African-Americans would be seen not as potential felons but as citizens targeted by a police apparatus in which they are many times more likely than their fellow white Americans to be stopped by the highway patrol, to be scrutinized in retail stores, and to be given the death penalty for violent crimes. Racial justice, in other words, is not solely a matter of public policy. And yet the cultural politics of racial justice have had to address the vicissitudes of public policy, ever more urgently since the insane Supreme Court decision of <span class="booktitle">McClesky v. Kemp</span> (1987) which held that statistics concerning race and executions, regardless of the weight or clarity of the statistics, were immaterial to challenges under the Eighth Amendment.</p>
<p>Now, I know that in making this argument I’m running the risk of preaching to the converted, bringing coals to Newcastle, and doing any number of similarly pointless things. I don’t imagine that very many of my actual or hypothetical readers opposed that provision of the President’s original crime bill on the grounds that it would create an unacceptable “quota system” for lethal injections. <cite id="note_6">The idea that the “racial justice” provision would create a quota for death sentences is almost too bizarre to admit of discussion, but one thing about this argument seems noteworthy: even though every conservative pundit from George Will to Cal Thomas denounced the provision, none of them realized (or cared to admit) that the provision would not mandate the execution of more white prisoners. In other words, the provision would simply have asked the courts to consider whether blacks were being executed in wildly disproportionate numbers - and, if so, to take that disproportion into consideration in sentencing. The provision might have prevented a handful of black inmates from being executed, perhaps, but it certainly would not have increased the number of white inmates executed. The fact that the media’s conservative chorus screamed so loud and so long over a provision that merely might have lowered (slightly) the number of black inmates executed seems to me one plausible explanation for why white and black Americans have such radically different perceptions of how the nation’s judicial system works.</cite> I adduce this example only because I want to walk this line carefully, and to insist not only on the difference between cultural politics and policy but also on their inevitable entanglement. What I’m saying in this regard has in fact been said before, most notably by Tony Bennett in an essay entitled “Putting Policy into Cultural Studies.” But it is symptomatic of our uncertainty about the politics of intellectual work, I think, that Bennett’s essay would have gotten so hostile a reception from so political a theorist as Frederic Jameson, who wrote in his <span class="journaltitle">Social Text</span> review of the Routledge <span class="journaltitle">Cultural Studies</span> collection that Bennett does not “seem to realize how obscene American left readers are likely to find his proposals on ‘talking to and working with what used to be called the ISAs rather than writing them off from the outset and then, in a self-fulfilling prophecy, criticizing them again when they seem to affirm one’s direst functionalist predictions’ ” (29). It is when I read passages such as this that I begin to fear the creation of an academic left whose only function is to analyze and interpret the formation of the hegemonies that are actually being formed by our counterparts on the right; I fear an intellectual regime in which cultural studies is nothing more than a parasitic kind of color commentator on the new authoritarian populism of the Age of Gingrich, too busy explaining the rise of the postmodern eugenicist-libertarian-cybernetic-fundamentalist Right to be of any use in actually opposing it. If you look at Mr. Limbaugh’s <span class="booktitle">See, I Told You So</span> you’ll see something of a looking-glass version of what I’m talking about; the passage I quoted earlier, in fact, appears in a chapter in which Limbaugh laments that all the liberals are reading Gramsci (would that this were so) and are engaging in a “war of position” against traditional American values. What Limbaugh cautions his readers against, needlessly but always strategically, is a world in which the left has all the tools to wage wars of position and the right is only belatedly trying to understand how the left so thoroughly dominates the nation; and I don’t think it’s paranoid or defeatist to suppose that at the moment, the reverse is much more nearly the case in the United States.</p>
<p>I want to remark briefly on the irony of broaching this issue by way of discussing black public intellectuals. There seemed to me - and there still seems to me - something grossly unfair about discussing the disjunction between left intellectuals and public policy by focusing on people like bell hooks or Cornel West or Derrick Bell, who do cultural politics that often have everything to do with public policy. In the <span class="journaltitle">New Yorker</span>, for example, I called attention to a passage in Michael Eric Dyson’s <span class="booktitle">Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X</span> in which Dyson relates a compliment he received from a young black admirer. He had just testified at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on gangsta rap, and he had quoted Snoop Doggy Dog verbatim from memory, prompting an observer to tell him, “for a guy your age, you really can flow” (xxi). In the context of Dyson’s book, the story concerns Dyson’s own relation to youth culture and to the discourse of black urban masculinity in crisis; but for want of a better alternative, I took Dyson’s story as the occasion to remark that “for cultural critics, the danger of popular acclaim is that it can tempt them to pay more attention to the responses of young admirers than to the deliberations of Senate subcommittees” (79). Dyson, I think, would have every reason to ask who’s zooming who here; and should he ask, I would have to admit that I myself have never been asked to testify before the Senate on any subject whatsoever. But Dyson’s presence in Washington only underscores my point: when the Senate Judiciary juvenile subcommittee opened its hearings on violence and misogyny in gangsta rap, Carol Moseley-Braun called on academic critics such as Dyson and Tricia Rose, who showed up to tell the Senate they were asking all the wrong questions. What were Dyson and Rose doing, I ask you, but talking - and talking back - to the ISAs? I stand by my point regardless of how ill-gotten it may have been in regard to Dyson - and what’s more, I wish his book <span class="booktitle">Making Malcolm</span> had said more about Dyson’s role in those hearings. Dyson’s work on Malcolm is scrupulous and, in its way, as relentless as is bell hooks in showing that the rhetoric of black nationalism renders a black subjectivity that is always already a black <span class="lightEmphasis">male</span> subjectivity. This too has something to do with the politics of lethal injections, as Ice Cube’s album of the same name suggests, and it cues us once again to the myriad connections between cultural and practical politics. But to repeat the point one last time, it’s one thing to make the entirely necessary argument that black nationalism foregrounds a masculinist politics and a male subjectivity; it’s another thing to translate that point into a political initiative that will realize some of its many implications for the disposition of revenues and statutes.</p>
<p>I can imagine three salient objections to what I’ve argued thus far, and I want to mention them partly because I want to agree with them ahead of time. The first is that the connections between intellectual work and the policy implications thereof are too often drawn sloppily or arbitrarily; accustomed as we are to unfolding arguments with care and rigor, it seems superfluous or even humiliating to have to tack on some kind of policy prescription once we’ve finished historicizing the nationalist subject. The second is that the connections between cultural politics and public policy are too often drawn at the expense of the former. This objection takes many forms, from Andrew Ross’ complaint that the aim of intellectual work should be to change consciousness rather than to enact statutes, to Edward Said’s warning that the intellectual who speaks truth to policy may wind up as the tool of the political apparatus he or she seeks to operate, to my own sense that cultural studies can be more easily compromised to fit the demands of public policy than can public policy be reimagined so as to accommodate the utopian yearnings of cultural studies. And the third objection, which no doubt occurred to some readers once they’d read my first few paragraphs, is that right-wing intellectuals are by definition closer to the sources of national political and economic power than any of the liberals and leftists I’ve mentioned; and it is only in this sense, I think, that we can make sense of Jameson’s repudiation of Tony Bennett’s proposals as “obscene.”</p>
<p>Because there’s nothing we can do about this third objection, other than hoping that more progressive organizations will see the need for massive fundraising at the national level, I’d like to address the first two for a moment. The link between theory and policy often is capricious and ill-conceived: as Jacob Weisberg pointed out in his review of <span class="booktitle">The Bell Curve</span>, you could accept every piece of Herrnstein and Murray’s work, the shoddy statistics, the impoverished measurement of “intelligence” by the g factor, the unwarranted confidence in our ability to define race, even the questionable use of “research” sponsored by neo-Nazi groups, and you could still come to the opposite conclusions from those drawn by Herrnstein and Murray. That is, you could posit a permanent and ineradicable intelligence differential based on “race,” whatever that is, and argue for the maintenance and expansion of the welfare state on precisely those grounds. Conversely, it would not be hard to imagine an argument for dismantling what remains of the welfare state on the reasoning that there is no correlation whatsoever between race and intelligence, and that affirmative action programs are therefore interfering with the “natural” distribution of intellectual talents.</p>
<p>I was rather forcibly brought up against this conundrum in my reading of Thomas Sowell’s <span class="booktitle">Race and Culture</span>, a book I’d like to offer as something of a model of right-wing global cultural studies. Knowing that in the <span class="journaltitle">New Yorker</span> I would have no more than two paragraphs in which to dispose of Sowell, I decided to concentrate on his “Race and Intelligence” chapter - again, partly because this is one of my signal obsessions at the moment, and partly because I thought it would be rhetorically effective. Sowell’s data happened to overlap with the data I had learned about from another source, namely, James Trent’s social-constructionist history of mental retardation in the United States, <span class="booktitle">Inventing the Feeble Mind</span> (which documents the symbiotic rise of eugenics and intelligence testing in the first decades of this century, and documents the policies of sterilization and institutionalization which began in the US in the 1920s and were then expanded to great effect by Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s). So, drawing on Trent together with Anthony Appiah, I thought I could make the point clearly enough: once you start historicizing and globalizing comparative studies of race and intelligence, you give the game away, by showing that intelligence differentials are in fact social and cultural rather than biological.</p>
<p>But since Sowell explicitly rules out the biological explanation of intelligence elsewhere in the book, I would have to make the point much more carefully than I thought - since Sowell’s argument itself is more careful than I had at first imagined. Here then is what I finally devised, with the help of a remarkable <span class="journaltitle">New Yorker</span> fact-checker by the name of Blake Eskin:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">“For many practical purposes,” he concludes, “it makes no difference whether poor performances in abstract thinking are due to neglect or to lack of capacity.” But this is no conclusion at all, since if groups’ differences are attributable to “neglect” - or worse, to active discrimination - then Sowell has inadvertently demonstrated the necessity for precisely the kind of ambitious social programs his career has been dedicated to attacking. (78)</p>
<p>I had fondly hoped that if I exposed this contradiction in a major magazine, the exposure would have some effect on something. But I have to admit what I’ve only alluded to above: despite my best efforts to analyze, historicize, deconstruct, and redefine the arguments of my opponents, I actually have not had all that much impact on national policy myself. The 104th Congress is going about the business of dismantling social programs despite the fact that one radical conservative claims natural, biological sanction for doing so, and another radical conservative explicitly rejects that reasoning yet comes to the same conclusion. It would seem, then, that right-wing intellectuals will somehow come to the conclusion that the unregulated “free market” provides the best of all possible worlds regardless of whether they find justification for this belief in nature or merely in culture. Even when Sowell explicitly disagrees with Murray’s premises, then, he nevertheless manages to agree with him on the policy tip. Borrowing a page from Andrew Ross, I like to think about this phenomenon in terms of the weather: Charles Murray wakes up, predicts sunny skies and a high in the 60s, and concludes that today would be a good day to eradicate the notion of racial justice; Thomas Sowell wakes up, predicts rain turning into sleet by nightfall, and concludes that today would be a good day to eradicate the notion of racial justice. It is no mystery why we should be skeptical about the prospect - or the potential value - of putting policy into cultural studies.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, my worry is not that academic progressives will construe cultural politics as something wholly other than practical politics; my worry is that we will tend to conflate them. In other words, I really don’t see any danger, at the moment, that the cultural left will decide that popular culture is not a proper location for political struggle, or that debates over race, ethnicity, clothing, cuisine, music, science, and technology have no manifest “political” content. On the contrary, I see plenty of danger that we will underestimate - or, worse, ignore - the difference between theoretical work on such subjects and the practical political effects such work can have for the people we’re talking <span class="lightEmphasis">about</span> if not necessarily talking to.</p>
<p>One recent instance of the disjunction between cultural studies and public policy stands out especially in my mind, partly because it’s drawn from a book whose theoretical sweep and ambition I admire and cannot hope to emulate, and partly because the book in question explicitly sets out to understand and contest the new conservatism in American life. At the end of <span class="booktitle">We Gotta Get Out</span> of this Place, Larry Grossberg alludes to the battles over “political correctness” that were erupting just as he was finishing his manuscript, and he castigates the left’s responses to PC, including my own, for how they “manage to avoid most of the issues and absolve themselves of all blame” (430). Wondering what issues we had avoided and what blame we should have accepted, I read further that “some people have taken extreme, absurd positions which should be criticized” (an interesting injunction, since Grossberg does not cite specific persons or positions) and that “the Left has to recognize the truth in the Right’s accusations: e.g., affirmative action in universities has not solved the problem and has created new ones” (383).</p>
<p>I want to remark on this notion that in the early months of 1991, as the PC attacks swept across the American media, we on the left should have taken some of the blame for the failures of affirmative action. I don’t think Grossberg is wrong to point to these problems; I just think that one could not plausibly single out affirmative action as terrain for concession to the New Right if one were paying even the faintest attention to the policy disputes of 1991. For it was then that the Civil Rights Act of 1991 was being bandied about in Congress, an Act which specifically sought to hold employers to the standard that job qualifications which screen out minorities and women must be related to a person’s ability to perform the job. In 1989, the Supreme Court had held, in one of its most perverse opinions, <span class="booktitle">Wards Cove v. Atonio</span>, that American courts had never established such a “job performance standard,” and the Bush Administration, led by C. Boyden Gray and Dick Thornburgh, was pushing for a weaker standard, requiring companies to show only that their hiring practices serve “legitimate employment goals” and requiring employees to identify the specific employment practice that brought about the alleged discrimination. (As policy analysts pointed out, this would allow employers to defend discriminatory practices on such vague grounds as corporate image, customer preference, or employee morale.) The bankruptcy of the Bush/Gray position, I should note, was exposed by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which showed that in 217 of 225 cases since 1971, the courts had indeed used the “job performance standard” the Bush Adminstration and the Rehnquist Court claimed not to exist. <cite id="note_7">See Koenig (1991).</cite></p>
<p>Now, let me remark on one important consequence of this somewhat arcane policy dispute. The most prominent and vocal Republican supporter of the Civil Rights Act of 1991 was Senator John Danforth of Missouri. Bush eventually signed the bill, but only after Danforth had served as Clarence Thomas’s point man and chief defender in the Senate in an unofficial quid pro quo for his (Bush’s) capitulation to what right-wing intellectuals to this day fraudulently call a “quota bill.” In the larger agenda of the Bush Administration, in other words, passage of the bill would be paid for by the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. No better example could be devised, I submit, of the profound interdependence of cultural politics and practical policymaking; and in this case, I can think of no better example of the cultural left’s often lamentable inattention to policy matters than Grossberg’s suggestion that in the PC debates of 1991, we should have acknowledged the “truth” in the Right’s attacks on affirmative action.</p>
<p>I am not suggesting that we all be called to account for the policy implications of our work, nor am I demanding that we each append to our next book or article a little “policy epilogue” that spells out the practical steps that follow from our analysis of Madonna, Malcolm, Macherey, or nationalism, imperialism, or gender and the public sphere. I am simply asking that we be attentive to the ways in which cultural studies might conceivably be of interest to, or intersect with the work of, theorists and political agents more directly involved with the policy machinery of the state. And this is why I can’t write the essay I originally planned, because to make the kind of case I’m making in <span class="lightEmphasis">this</span> essay is to call out the limitations in my own work. To date, my conception of the so-called “public intellectual” has relied almost exclusively on the very model I criticize in the New York intellectuals, the same model that still dominates most of our discussion of the subject: the intellectual who engages with what Peter Uwe Hohendahl, following Habermas, calls the “literary public sphere” (1982). My conception of selling out, therefore, was confined solely to the question of how American cultural studies could best represent itself in the mainstream press. I now want to suggest that there is at least as important a difference between the literary public sphere and the public policy sphere as the difference between cultural politics and public policy, and that most cultural studies intellectuals, myself most assuredly included, have not yet begun to think seriously about how best to negotiate that difference.</p>
<p>To admit that difference and to seek to negotiate it would be to sell out, and no one has said so more emphatically, of late, than Mas’ud Zavarzadeh. In one of his most recent attacks on the ludic American academy, Zavarzadeh writes that “the various tendencies of ludic populism can perhaps best be outlined by examining the emerging figure of the post-al ‘public intellectual’ ” (106). Zavarzadeh goes on to insist that “the bourgeois ‘public intellectual’ - in the name of democratizing knowledge - perpetuates the ignorance of the people and deepens their dependence on the knowledge industry” (107). The heart of his critique goes to the heart of my argument: “the credibility of the bourgeois ‘public intellectual’ is established by his/her ‘activism,’ which is, itself, an ‘affirmation’ of the system by accepting (affirming) its rules and playing inside the system according to the rules of reform…. The ‘public intellectual’ is a figure invented to combine this deep anti-intellectualism and counter-revolutionary affirmation of the commonsense with reformist localism” (107).</p>
<p>To most of Zavarzadeh’s indictment I have to plead guilty as charged: I am committed to playing inside the system according to the rules of reform - though I’ve argued as often as I can that there’s all the difference in the world between weak and strong reformism (and, it should go without saying, I am anti-intellectual and counter- revolutionary to boot). But I will differ with Zavarzadeh in one respect: I do not want to fetishize the local. On the contrary, it seems to me that what we need most desperately in the wake of 1994 are new discourses of national identity, new discourses of national unity. The academic left normally does not even contemplate the possibility of such discourses except as expressions of conservative, nostalgic, cryptofascist fantasy. But while we’ve been making the case against imposing or presuming a common American culture, the New Right has worked assiduously to destroy the material foundations of what can at least potentially sustain us as a common society. That’s why their attacks on the realm of the public are so important, and why it is so important that we reclaim and rejuvenate “the public” in the name of the people. It may seem comic or tragic that the New Right so painstakingly undermines our common social foundations, like public schools and social services, at the same time that it makes a cottage industry of screeds lamenting our loss of a common culture or a common morality. But I think we should understand these phenomena as complementary symptoms of the same general development: as the 104th Congress tries to undo the federal government by parceling out social services in “block grants” to the states, thereby reminding us that the purpose of the so-called “new Federalism” of the 1980s was precisely to Balkanize our national laws pertaining to taxation, abortion, welfare, schooling, and school lunches, we will undoubtedly hear all the more empty, idealist nationalist rhetoric about the need to affirm traditional values and bring back a common sense of shame - and we will hear this, needless to say, from people whose political behavior is itself nothing other than shameful. As Samuel Luttwak has written in a brief essay cheerily entitled “Why Fascism is the Wave of the Future,”</p>
<p class="longQuotation">It is only mildly amusing that nowadays the standard Republican/Tory dinner speech is a two-part affair, in which part one celebrates the virtues of unimpeded competition and dynamic structural change, while part two mourns the decline of the family and community ‘values’ that were eroded precisely by the forces commended in part one. (6)</p>
<p>It is in this moment of crisis, then, that cultural studies intellectuals need to imagine a language wherein national identity and American cultural politics are mobilized not as they were in California, when a rainbow coalition of hyphenated Americans got together to pass Proposition 187, but wherein “patriotism” is redefined as that sentiment which prevents us from letting our fellow citizens starve, beg, or go homeless. The right knows that its rewards for detaching a sense of national identity from a sense of public citizenship can be great indeed: as long as the ideological construction of “American identity” has nothing to do with access to housing, health care, employment, or basic nutrition, our leaders can continue to reap the benefits of the industrialized world’s most inequitable tax system while our fellow citizens live with the industrialized world’s highest rates of child mortality and childhood poverty. And if we do not imagine an alternative conception of national identity, I fear that our federal government’s fiscal powers will be further weakened as its police powers are steadily expanded - such that fascism, to borrow Luttwak’s phrase, will be the wave of the future.</p>
<p>I realize that I run the risk of reaffirming the very discursive formation I seek to undermine; in focusing on national identity I may be simply proposing nationalism as a refuge from capitalism, and thereby hastening the rise of the repressive, punitive discourses of national identity we see at work in California. I must admit I am not sure what I think about this: for Luttwak, it is the globalization of capital rather than the resurgence of nationalism that threatens to precipitate the return of fascism, and in an era when the most vocal opponents of GATT and NAFTA are Patrick Buchanan, Ross Perot, and Ralph Nader, I have to say I do not know what the relations between nationalism and capitalism may be in the future, or indeed what they may be in the present. I know the danger here is that of proposing reactional countermoves, concocting counterdiscourses, and ultimately playing into the hands of the ISAs. But that is a danger I believe we must court; and I believe we have nothing to lose in doing so - except our theoretical purity.</p>
<p>I want to close with one parable about that danger. I was perusing the Down syndrome discussion group on the Internet a few months ago when I saw a posting from a self-described conservative Republican that advised parents of disabled children how to deal with the new Republican Congress, particularly if they’d just lost a liberal Democrat to a conservative Republican. Since the abolition of unfunded federal mandates has the potential to eviscerate the Americans with Disabilities Act, and since on the state level we had indeed lost a progressive activist to a local right-wing machine politician, my spouse and I read this posting with great interest. It advised us not to talk about “rights and entitlements,” but to emphasize instead our child’s potential for “self-sufficiency”; and not to talk about “justice” or “fairness,” since life is inherently unfair, but to insist on the value-neutral principle of equality before the law. Much as we hated to admit it, we thought this was good, well-intentioned, pragmatic advice, and we were briefly grateful for the lesson in how to tailor our political convictions to the purpose of maintaining our son’s social services. <span class="lightEmphasis">Briefly</span> grateful, that is, until we read a brilliant posting from a woman named Janet Curtis, who, identifying herself as “nothing more than a poor housewife,” fired back a reply that said, in effect, how <span class="lightEmphasis">dare</span> you tell me not to say those words which conservative Republicans don’t want to hear, like “rights” or “justice,” and that pointed out the vacuity of the phrase “equality before the law,” since the law prevents rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges. But the reply did not stop there; it went on to point out that if a pregnant woman were to make a decision on whether to carry the fetus to term on the basis of whether the child, when born, could hope to achieve the self-sufficiency Republicans recommend for the disabled, conservatives would be the first people in her face, blocking that decision by invoking the “rights” of the unborn.</p>
<p>I want to point out that this little exercise in rhetorical analysis and critical legal studies was undertaken not by a cultural studies theorist, nor by someone dependent on the knowledge industry run by bourgeois sellouts like me, but by an ordinary citizen of these United States, operating in extraordinary circumstances not of her own making. But more important, I want to pass along to you what this exchange has taught me: first, that sometimes, the cost of selling out to the discourses of policymakers is too steep to bear, particularly if it means disavowing the languages of social and cultural justice; and second, that Ms. Curtis’ reply, mixing righteous indignation with a keen eye for ideological contradiction, should serve to remind us that our task in selling out is not to capitulate to the terms our historical moment has offered us, but rather, to find the terms with which we can best <span class="lightEmphasis">contest</span> those terms, and in so doing redescribe and redefine both our cultural politics and our social policies.</p>
<p style="text-align:center">__________________</p>
<h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>Anderson, Amanda (1992). “Cryptonormativism and Double Gestures: Reconceiving Poststructuralist Social Theory.” <span class="journaltitle">Cultural Critique 21</span> (1992): 63-95.</p>
<p>Benhabib, Seyla, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser (1995). <span class="booktitle">Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange</span>. New York: Routledge.</p>
<p>Bennett, Tony (1992). “Putting Policy into Cultural Studies.” <span class="journaltitle">Cultural Studies</span>, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler. New York: Routledge. 23-37.</p>
<p>Bérubé, Michael (1994). “Life As We Know It: A Father, A Son, and Genetic Destiny.” <span class="journaltitle">Harper’s Magazine 289</span> (December): 41-51.</p>
<p>Bérubé, Michael (1995). “Public Academy.” <span class="journaltitle">The New Yorker</span>, January 9: 73-80.</p>
<p>Bérubé, Michael, and Cary Nelson (1995). <span class="booktitle">Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities</span>. New York: Routledge.</p>
<p>Bloom, Alexander (1986). <span class="booktitle">Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and their World</span>. New York: Oxford University Press.</p>
<p>Boynton, Robert S. (1995). “The New Intellectuals.” <span class="journaltitle">Atlantic Monthly</span>. March: 53-70.</p>
<p>Crimp, Douglas, ed. (1988). <span class="booktitle">AIDS: Cultural Analysis/ Cultural Activism</span>. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.</p>
<p>Dickstein, Morris (1992). <span class="booktitle">Double Agent: The Critic and Society</span> New York: Oxford University Press.</p>
<p>Dyson, Michael Eric (1994). <span class="booktitle">Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X</span>. New York: Oxford University Press</p>
<p>Grossberg, Lawrence (1992). <span class="booktitle">We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture</span>. New York: Routledge.</p>
<p>Hohendahl, Peter Uwe (1982). <span class="booktitle">The Institution of Criticism</span>. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. “Hot Type.” (1994). <span class="journaltitle">Chronicle of Higher Education. December 14: 10.</span></p>
<p>Jacoby, Russell (1993): “Journalists, Cynics, and Cheerleaders.” <span class="journaltitle">Telos 97</span>: 53-84.</p>
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<p style="text-align:center">__________________</p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/jameson">jameson</a>, <a href="/tags/charis-conn">charis conn</a>, <a href="/tags/jacoby">jacoby</a>, <a href="/tags/fromm">fromm</a>, <a href="/tags/dickstein">dickstein</a>, <a href="/tags/berube">berube</a>, <a href="/tags/politics">politics</a>, <a href="/tags/culture-wars">culture wars</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator790 at http://electronicbookreview.com